On Stallman on Qt, the GPL, KDE and GNOMEMany of us woke up this morning and read Richard Stallman's editorial on Linux Today with a growing sense of incredulity. At first, some of us thought it was a joke -- it didn't make any logical sense, after all. But after it sunk in that Stallman was doing yet another snowjob on KDE, a lot of our incredulity turned to anger. If you want the official KDE position on his editorial, go here. But if you want to know how a few KDE developers feel, read on. Stallman has been a longtime detractor of the KDE Project. So much so, that his Free Software Foundation helped start a project whose only purpose was to be an "anti-KDE" -- GNOME. The GNOME developers themselves have gotten past all that and have created something that stands on its own merits. Stallman, though, seems to still be stuck in the past with his "KDE is bad, use GNOME to punish them" mantra. Basically, Stallman saw that with Qt under the GPL, all of his licensing problems went away. Ergo, there was nothing for him to fall back on anymore. So he comes up with this notion that we have to beg forgiveness of our copyright holders or we will be in violation of the GPL forever. Beg forgiveness? What kind of bullshit is this? It's definitely two-faced, that's for sure. Why? Because in all of the scores of emails over several years, he never once said a single word about this. Never. Not even recently when Trolltech approached him to give his "blessing" on the Qt license change. In fact, the first time this has ever come up was when he saw that KDE isn't quite so evil anymore. So he creates a 'lex KDE' - a special rule that only applies to KDE. Don't get us wrong; we could understand and accept that Stallman would still push GNOME over KDE -- it is under the GNU umbrella after all. That's fine. What isn't fine is inventing special rules after the fact just to bash KDE. This is hardly fair play. Just KDE, you ask? Yes! In all previous cases of potential GPL violations over the years (and there have been a lot), a license change was accepted as a cure. No mention of "forgiveness" has ever been uttered. We even accepted it, for example, on copyright violations done by GNOME. When they removed KDE copyright notices from code they copied from us (khtmlw), a simple email discussion was enough to fix the problem. At no time did we demand that they beg our forgiveness for their violation -- it's just not something that rational adults do. So what we are left with is a childish, spiteful act by somebody who clearly can't stand to see us survive. Enough's enough -- we have bent over backwards to ensure that all license issues are resolved once and for. We will not enter into his game anymore.
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